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Do the career motives of presidential appointees affect program administration? To answer this question, I examine the phased development of policy communication of the U.S. Farm Service Agency (FSA) across states from 2002 to 2018 based on an original collection of historical official websites. This is a rare policy context for examining why peer appointees administer the same programs differently. Linking the state‐by‐state development of FSA newsletters to the career trajectories of state executive directors (SEDs), the presidential appointees who lead state FSAs, I show that SEDs interested in elective office post‐appointment are associated with faster institutionalization of newsletters. Examining these newsletters’ content, I then show that SEDs interested in elective office or a career in advocacy include more participation‐encouraging language in newsletters. These results suggest that appointees’ career goals outside the bureaucracy can potentially expedite innovation in program implementation and enhance the delivery of government benefits to the public, with implications for selecting appointees to enhance bureaucratic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To lobby legislators, it is important for interest groups to signal their ability to help legislators win elections and provide them with policy-relevant information. We explore for-profit companies' use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports as a signaling device to promote their reputation to legislators and convey their ability to provide electoral and policymaking support, which is valuable for lobbying. To this end, we create a panel dataset by combining ESG reports issued by US companies and the same companies' lobbying and campaign contribution records from 1999 to 2017. We expect companies to issue more ESG reports, as well as reports containing more quantitative content, when they lobby. The data conform to our expectations. We also reason that lobbying may be more strongly related to ESG reporting when it is coupled with campaign contributions made by affiliated corporate political action committees, but the data do not support this expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the role of former clerks to Supreme Court justices on the Court's agenda setting process. We find that when a former clerk is the attorney on either a cert petition or an amicus brief, the Court is more likely to hear a case, compared to advocacy by a non-former clerk. To help explain these patterns, we draw on the broader literature on "revolving door" politics. We argue that the most plausible mechanisms are either that former clerks are more effective advocates or that their presence in a case signals its importance to the Court. Alternatively, former clerks may select into cases that the Court is likely to grant. While we cannot definitively disentangle these competing mechanisms, the strong patterns in the data suggest that the importance of the revolving door in judicial politics extends broadly into the domain of agenda setting and is thus worthy of further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do lobbyists contribute money to legislators to build relationships in government? I show that lobbyists deploy resources strategically to get access to officials by analyzing newly available data on foreign lobbying in the U.S. government from 1998 to 2019, which contain information on lobbyists' campaign contributions and contact with officials. Using supervised machine learning models, I identify lobbyist requests for access to members of Congress and classify them as either successful or unsuccessful. The data show that lobbyists request access almost exclusively to legislators to whom they made campaign contributions. Furthermore, lobbyists who contributed money to legislators are more likely to gain access to them than lobbyists who did not, but only if the legislators are ideologically similar and in the same party. While the data and research design I employ do not allow me to infer causal influence of contributions on access, these results suggest that lobbyists make contributions to foster an environment conducive to contact with like-minded officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Trump's rhetoric, character, actions, and policy agenda have regularly posed strategic dilemmas for congressional Republicans. While Trump and much of his agenda are broadly unpopular, he has continued to enjoy strong support from the Republican voters who form their core electoral support. In this article, we analyze congressional Republicans' responses to several of Trump's most widely reported and controversial actions and comments as well as his legislative agenda. We find that congressional Republicans' personal and legislative positions on Trump reflected their electoral circumstances, their prior reactions to Trump during the campaign, and their ideological leanings. We also consider the positions adopted by congressional Democrats, who faced a more conventional problem of adapting to the president's level of local support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Trump's nomination posed a challenge for Republican congressional candidates running on the ticket with him in 2016. The nominee's intense base of support within the party combined with his unprecedented unpopularity more broadly required these candidates to think strategically about supporting or opposing him. This article examines how they responded to that challenge, what explains their different responses, and what electoral consequences ensued from their choices. The data show that candidates' positions on Trump primarily reflected the partisanship of their districts and secondarily their gender and incumbency status. Their strategic choices had little general impact in an election almost completely dominated by partisanship, but in at least a few instances refusal to support Trump may have been necessary for the Republican incumbent to win reelection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]